As new believers in 1950, Bob and Fae Tripp were committed to raising their children according to the Word of God. Their children knew that Sunday worship “was a nonnegotiable part”1 of their weekly schedule and that each day began with a time of family devotion. Bob was not a pastor and not even a great teacher, but he was faithful in leading his family to understand what 19th-century Presbyterian pastor and Princeton professor James W. Alexander called the “feeling that God must be honored in everything, that no business of life can proceed without Him.”2
The Tripp family sounds as if it could have existed in Puritan Scotland during the 17th century when even “the humblest persons in the remotest cottages honored God by daily praise”3 and family worship. But Bob lived in the middle of the 20th century, when the practice of family worship had been largely dismissed, even among the best churches and best Christian men.4
Early in the morning, before the first light of dawn, the Tripp family was roused from their beds. They gathered with sleep still in their eyes because Bob was convinced that it was important for every member of his family to be involved. In these small gatherings, he would read from Scripture, they would pray for one another concerning the day ahead, and they would lift their voices in praise of their Savior Jesus Christ. The Tripp’s oldest son, Tedd, had recently been hired to work at a factory requiring him to leave the house long before the rest of the family would normally wake. So rather than let his son begin the day without the benefit of family worship, Bob woke the others, letting them return to bed only after Tedd had left the home strengthened by their corporate devotion.5
In the years to come, the younger son Paul could not remember much of what the family read during these early morning meetings, but he was always impressed by his father’s “unaltering commitment to family worship” because “nothing got in the way” of gathering them to participate in their “time of reading and prayer.”6 Bob’s efforts to teach his family to “seek first the kingdom of God” (Matt. 6:33) played no small part in their later openness to the calling of God. Both boys came to a saving faith in Christ at an early age and later committed their lives to vocational ministry. Both Paul and Tedd have been pastors and seminary professors, and both have written books on Christian parenting.
It is possible that these young men would have heeded the call of God upon their lives had they not been trained to honor and worship Him daily at an early age. But without such benefits, the Tripp brothers might well have left the church in adulthood, as is the case with 88% of churched youth today.7 Surely it is time to revive the practice of family worship and to believe with Jonathan Edwards that “Every Christian family ought to be as it were a little church”8
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Endnotes
1 Paul David Tripp, Age of Opportunity: A Biblical Guide to Parenting Teens (Philipsburg: P & R, 1997), 190.
2 James W. Alexander, Thoughts on Family Worship (1847; repr., Morgan, PA: Soli Deo Gloria, 1998), 33.
3 Ibid., 11.
4 Donald S. Whitney, Family Worship: In the Bible, in History & in Your Home (Shepherdsville, KY: Center for Biblical Spirituality, 2005), 1.
5 Tripp, 190.
6 Ibid.
7 Alvin L. Reid, Raising the Bar: Ministry to Youth in the New Millennium (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2004), 44.
8 Quoted in Whitney, 15.
